What is useful
Day 4 - some thoughts on the usefulness of abstractions
Tactile tools, physical objects I can hold with immediate affordances. A screwdriver when there’s screws about. The screwdriver is obviously useful. There is a use immediately for the screwdriver. How do we actually determine if something is useful, particularly abstractions? Can we declare “negotiation is a useful skill”? Can we add, “delegation too, is a useful skill”?
Many people delegate or negotiate. And if they could do either better, it would be useful to them.
There are plenty of things that ain’t useful. If you tell me Vladimir Nabokov’s street address from 1935, and I’m not in Berlin, it’s not going to be useful to me. Not to mention the building was probably razed to the ground during WWII, and the obvious obstacle of Nabokov being long dead. Makes it a bit difficult to see the usefulness don’t ya think? It’s a tad less useful than a screwdriver, when I see a loose screw.
Your immediate surroundings, they impact the apparent and actual utility of a tool or idea. But your circumstances change constantly. So we’re dealing with a sliding scale of usefulness.
A loose screw, a screwdriver is useful. A tight screw that holds closed a panel, still, a screwdriver is useful. Eating soup? Spoon not screwdriver. But I’m not going to bark out “DON’T EVER PESTER ME WITH A SCREWDRIVER, I’M EATING SOUP”. Because, I don’t know what screwy situation I’ll be in next.
How often do you find yourself wishing you had a screwdriver handy? A spoon when someone cuts you a slide of cake? I’m a world champion at forgetting-to-grab-napkins-and-cutterly-from-the-fast-food-counter. I can tell you that how useful they are becomes readily apparent.
At the risk of sounding like Steve Jobs, abstractions are tools for the mind. And questions like “which skills are more useful to me?” may not be immediately apparent. Especially if I intend to change career tract, move to another country, give it all up – which skills will be useful in my new circumstances?
I walk into a careers expo where there are many stalls offering all sorts of upskilling opportunities: The salesman behind the stall for a negotiation course assures me: You’ll be negotiating later this very day. You’ll be deciding which movie to watch with your friend, or you’ll negotiate over the venue for a date with your partner, or you’ll try to plead with your boss to be let home early but work late tomorrow. Negotiation is useful every day, not just for hostage negotiators and corporate raiders. But even then, life or death questions, billions of dollars hanging in the balance – negotiation is what determines if a deal is made or not. Negotiation is useful not only because you use it every day, but you use it on the important things!
He makes a compelling case, in a daze I spin around the expo, and bump into a conveniently placed devil’s advocate for Delegation: You’ll negotiate sure, but first you want to delegate. When it comes time to negotiate the sales price for your house or a big company you could do it yourself, and maybe you should. But what if you know someone a friend, a lawyer, an agent who is a better negotiator than you? Should you delegate the role to them? The decision to do something yourself or to hire someone else is always making use of the skill of delegation because you’re assessing who is better equipped, better positioned, and more available to reach your goal. When you hire a gardener, you could do it yourself, but you’re delegating it. Picking a restaurant – you’re delegating to a chef. You’re not negotiating which restaurant; you’re delegating the job to someone else. Delegation is the most useful skill you can have, you use it every day, even when you don’t delegate you’re still using the skill!
It seems to me no matter what, I’ll be negotiating or delegating, how can either not be useful? In a pique of metacognition, I wonder: how useful is it to think about these skills in that way? How useful is such metacognition?
It occurs to me that neither is useful, they are both running in December, and I’ve got flights booked. That’s the end of that. But I can’t help wonder if that flight is useful?